Friday, September 21, 2012

Quote of the Day: The Libya Narrative

It was a spontaneous reaction to a crappy video! It was a planned terrorist attack! It was both! Neither! Something ... SQUIRREL!What's the deal with the White House's wonky take on the Libya embassy debacle? PERFECT ASSESSMENT:

“I think this is a case of an administration saying what they wished to be true before waiting for all the facts to come in.”

1 comment:

The simplest explanation for the Obama admin's wishful characterization of the Stevens attack is they're protecting Obama's Libya policy. Susan Rice is the obvious connection: Rice was instrumental in Clinton's obfuscation on the Rwanda genocide and she's obfuscating again to protect Obama's Libya policy.

For Obama, Libya isn't just any Arab Spring country. The Libya intervention was touted as THE model case for ‘responsible’ intervention under Obama. In his 2011 speech explaining the Libya intervention, Obama explicitly contrasted the Libya intervention to the Iraq intervention. As narrative, Obama’s Libya policy was purposely shaped as the anti-Iraq, where Obama supposedly did right everything that Bush supposedly did wrong with Iraq. (Never mind that the circumstances of the two interventions were different.)

Colin Powell famously said of Iraq that the ‘you break it, you bought it’ principle applied, and the US had a moral duty to stay and help build the post-Saddam Iraq. A main feature of Obama’s Libya intervention was the US, despite playing a major role in deposing Qaddafi, would play a minimal role in post-Qaddafi Libya. In other words, Obama chose a principle of ‘you break it, you leave the mess’ for anyone else (like Islamists) eager to shape post-Qaddafi Libya.

Like Susan Rice once helped Clinton avoid the Rwandan genocide, the Obama administration is attempting to avoid a course change in Libya that would call into question the entire, loudly anti-Bush thrust of Obama's foreign policy.